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Electronic Literature in Ireland Electronic Literature in Ireland James O’Sullivan Published in the Electronic Book Review at: https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/electronic-literature-in-ireland/ Licensed under: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License *** Literary Ireland has long embraced experimentation.1 So, in an artistic community that typically gravitates towards the new, it is culturally anomalous to see that electronic literature2 has failed to flourish. Ireland, sitting at the nexus between the North American and European e-lit communities, should be playing a more active role in what is becoming an increasingly significant literary movement. This article provides a much needed account of the field of electronic literature as it exists at present within an Irish context, simultaneously exploring those circumstances which have contributed to its successes and failures. Doing so rectifies a major gap in the national media archaeologies of this field, presenting an incomplete yet untold culturally specific literary history. While a complete literary history of Ireland’s e-lit community3 cannot be accomplished within the constraints of this single essay—there will inevitably be limitations in scope, practitioners I have failed to acknowledge, writings I have missed in my review—what can be achieved here is the beginning of a discourse which will hopefully flourish in years to come. Electronic Literature as Community What makes for a literary movement? In many respects, literary movements are, like any cohort, little more than the coming together of like-minded individuals who share a common interest in a particular ideology or practice—communities are about a shared culture, some elusive thing that binds. The ability to convincingly identify a movement and its lines of aesthetic demarcation, however vague, largely comes through subsequent critical interventions. The inherent risk is that such interventions are determined by the institutions and cultural contexts from which they emerge, and so, when I speak of the e-lit movement, I am typically referring to a largely westernised4 community of scholars and practitioners5 operating under the umbrella of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). Like any organisation of this nature, particular cultural contexts will inevitably be emphasised. In the case of the ELO, the body was founded and developed under predominantly American influences, comprising a leadership and membership largely situated within North America and Europe. As many of us—that is, those who are most likely to read this essay—have found our peers through ELO-based interactions, it is natural that our view of the e-lit movement would be confined to the aforementioned regions and contexts. This is not a criticism of the ELO—a group which does valuable work promoting electronic literature across the globe—but rather, an acceptance of the fact that our appreciation of that which constitutes a movement is greatly influenced by the creative and critical cultures in which we ourselves are situated. 1 I make these points in the knowledge that this essay is founded on a dangerous premise, the suggestion that Ireland’s e-lit community is not as mature as its American and European counterparts. There may well be Irish communities of practice of which I am ignorant, artistic groups that have never held any interest in interacting with the same ELO-based cohort as myself, or who, siloed as much as the rest of us, are unaware of the existence of such bodies. If one accepts that the idea of an e-lit movement or community will differ depending on the scholarly or cultural contexts involved, then it should be noted that, for me, the e-lit movement is the community of scholarly and artistic practice which operates between Europe and North America, and typically comes under the auspices of the ELO. Thus, this narrative operates within very specific cultural and community contexts, situating artistic practice in Ireland within very “ELO-centric” conceptualisations of electronic literature. Scholars interested in the broader topic of e-lit communities would be well served familiarising themselves with Electronic Literature Communities (Rettberg, Tomaszek, and Baldwin 2015), or indeed, the Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 3 (Boluk et al. 2016), which usefully allows readers to segment works by country of origin. My concern is much narrower, my concern is with electronic literature and its place within literary Ireland. Film Poems / Poetry Films in Contemporary Irish Literature In an international context, the history of born-digital literature has not yet been thoroughly documented; most scholars have focused on theorisation, as opposed to excavation, of the field.6 Manovich expresses similar concerns, drawing parallels with cinema and his fear that “future theorists and historians of computer media will be left with not much more than the equivalents of the newspaper reports and film programs from cinema’s first decades” (2001, 6). The history of electronic literature is one which has neglected particular regional contexts, though it is scholars like myself who must assume the blame for this neglect—our role is to extract meaning from the creativity and cultural production we wish to see protected, achieving preservation through criticism as curation. Those of us who wish greater prominence for our national contexts should make the effort to achieve just that, following the lead of scholars who have accounted for the French (Bouchardon 2012), Nordic (Rustad 2012), and Catalonian (Castanyer 2012) communities. This is not to say that Ireland is without its e-lit scholars—Anne Karhio, Jeneen Naji, and Kenneth Keating have done work on the topic (Naji 2012; Karhio 2014, 2015; Karhio et al. 2015; Karhio 2017; Keating 2017),7 while Nerys Williams, a high-profile critic who largely works on print literature, has also touched on the form (2011)—rather, it is merely an acknowledgement that, as a national cohort, we need to do more. Considering the vibrancy of Ireland’s literary grassroots, it is surprising that a more dynamic community of e-lit practitioners has not yet come to the fore—they might exist, but if so, then they are going about their business rather discreetly. For me, the idea of a literary grassroots encapsulates the community of artists and practitioners who operate within a context that is sustained by the space that they occupy. Space is paramount, in that the constituents of a strong artistic grassroots are usually bound by proximity. Proximity is not just about logistics, though it helps when these groups of like-minded individuals can coalesce; it is also about a shared socio-cultural context—art emerges from one’s environment, so shared environments will mean shared/contested aesthetics. The aforementioned vibrancy of Ireland’s literary grassroots is difficult to quantify, but there are a few resources to which one 2 might point as evidence for such: publicly-funded bodies like the Munster Literature Centre and Poetry Ireland, for example, are continually disseminating calls for submissions, workshops, competitions, and readings. The former runs two major international poetry and short story festivals, as well as numerous prestigious prizes and competitions. Despite what many may see as a lack of public support for the Arts, new journals, writers, and literary projects continue to emerge, and, as one would expect in trying times, new literary stars are born (Jordan 2015; Gilmartin 2015; Tannam 2016; Nolan 2016). On an island where literature is so fundamental to the artistic consciousness, it is remarkable that relatively few authors have engaged with the digital as a literary instrument. It is in the notion of literary grassroots that we find some insight into this problem: Irish cultural production is, at a certain level, very much about the existence of networks of practice.8 Authors undergo something of a rite of passage— participating in workshops and readings, publishing in journals of varying prestige— in an effort to hone their craft and build their reputation among peers. Ireland’s community of e-lit practitioners is still fledgling, and so this vital network has simply not yet matured. Again, this idea is difficult to measure, but you can see it, in weekly gatherings like Ó Bhéal, at the aforementioned Munster Literature festivals9—the same faces appear, they know each other, they share ideas and words and develop in unison. Electronic literature has no real place of equivalence, a place for exchange; there are signs, however, of the digital beginning a slow but steady permeation. Doireann Ní Ghríofa has been experimenting with multimodality for several years (Ní Ghríofa 2016a, 2016b, 2016c), while Graham Allen is writing a one-line-a-day autobiographical piece entitled Holes (Karhio 2017),10 published by my own New Binary Press (Allen and O’Sullivan 2016). During a Q&A at the 2018 Cork International Poetry Festival, Elaine Cosgrove, one of Ireland’s finest young writers (O’Sullivan 2018), explained that she was learning to code so that she might better explore computational aesthetics. In 2012, Geoffrey Squires published “a number of digital texts which departed from traditional publishing processes and were disseminated online through various media” (Keating 2016, 145), while some of Dublin artist Conor McGarrigle's work might be counted as literary. The aforementioned works by Ní Ghríofa, in particular, represent a popular trend in Ireland’s community of multimodal practitioners—the
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